During
its best moments, The Finest Hours
communicates the tremendous power of the sea and how it dwarfs humankind's best
efforts to conquer or even to survive it. There are shots and scenes here that
overwhelm with a sense of the kinetic, uncontrollable force of nature, as the
stern section of a massive oil tanker, which has been ripped in two by the waves
and a storm, is tossed around like a child's toy in a bathtub. Then there's a
much smaller vessel, manned by four members of the United States Coast Guard,
which much ascend these towering waves or plow straight them—the ship speeding
underwater like a seabird diving for prey.

The
movie's concerns seem almost exclusively nautical in nature, and that extends to
the characters, as well. It makes perfect sense, given the situation at hand.
There's little to no time for discussion about personal lives, especially for
the men aboard the split tanker, who quickly realize that the remains of their
ship are going to sink with all of them aboard unless they can determine a way
to survive. For the men of the Coast Guard, there's a bit more in that regard.
Our central protagonist is a man who is recently engaged to be married, and
before the tanker and another one are torn in twain, his primary goal for the
day is to receive permission from his commanding officer to marry his best girl.

If
there's another thing, then, that the movie communicates effectively, it's the
almost single-minded efforts of these men. In the moment, nothing else matters,
except that the men aboard the tanker survive the storm and that the sailors in
the Coast Guard boat reach the tanker before it is lost. In a way, the movie's
driving dramatic force is not conflict. It's nobility.

That is
an intriguing notion. There are needs here that drive the story and the
characters. The need for the men on the tanker is obvious: survival—not only
for each individual but also for their fellow sailors. The men in the boat, on
their way to save the survivors of the tanker disaster, is equally obvious but a
little more difficult to fathom: the need to rescue.

It's
often said that a soldier fights for the man next to him, but that sentiment
doesn't translate to this situation. Here, the sailors of this crew are
constantly putting themselves and each other at risk in order to save a group of
men they do not know. "We all live together, or we all die together,"
Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) shouts during a key moment of decision, when he and
his crew realize that their vessel is ill-equipped for the task at hand. Those
aren't empty words for him or for anyone else in that situation at that moment.

The
narrative, based on a true event from 1952 (The screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul
Tamasy, and Eric Johnson is based on the non-fiction book by Casey Sherman and
Michael J. Tougias), is split into three sections. The first follows Bernie and
his crew (played by Ben Foster, Kyle Gallner, and John Magaro) as they make
their way to the tanker without the aid of being able to radio back to their
base or of a compass, which is destroyed during the rough trek over the waves
formed by the bar leading from Chatham, Massachusetts, to the sea. The second
focuses on Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), the tanker's engineer, as he rallies the
surviving crew members together, stopping them from taking lifeboats into the
violent waters and engineering a makeshift tiller to control the ship's rudder.
The goal is to run the ship aground and wait for a rescue that they aren't sure
is coming.

The
third section involves Bernie's fiancée Miriam (Holliday Grainger), who wants
and, yes, needs to do something to help her future husband but struggles to
determine what actions to take. She argues with the base's commanding officer
(Eric Bana), repeatedly asking that he call Bernie back home, but to no avail.
She eventually winds up in the home of a woman (Rachel Brosnahan) whose husband
died in a similar storm a year prior. As good as Grainger is in the role and as
useful as it is to see the way this community comes together to support these
men, there is an undeniable disconnect between the land-based story and what's
happening on the water.

If the
scenes at sea suffer from some disconnect (They do, to an extent), it's only
because the screenplay and director Craig Gillespie are so dedicated to the idea
that these men are operating on vital moment-to-moment decisions. There's little
time to get to know these men (It is interesting to see the way that Pine and
Affleck's performances complement each other, as both actors, in very different
ways, play men who say no more than what needs to be said). That's fine, given
the movie's purpose, but there's also little by way of helping us to understand
fully what they're doing and why they're doing it.

This is
a depiction of events with just enough context for us to recognize and
appreciate the characters' noble intentions and heroism. The
Finest Hours definitely gets that point across, but it also leaves a feeling
of wanting more.